A new "Veggie Tales" movie is hitting the silver screen and, as may well be expected, the New York Times doesn't like it much.

That's not so surprising coming from the hallowed pages of the broadsheet bible of the secular left. But as Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News's Religion Blog notes, it appears the hostile NYT reviewer is wholly unfamiliar with the Veggie Tales franchise and so may hardly have been the best reviewer for the assignment in the first place:

The New York Times has a bad review today of the new VeggieTales film, "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything." It's a bad review, in the sense that it slams the movie. But it's also a badly written review in that it seems to be written by someone who has never heard of or seen any of the VeggieTales previous cartoons or movies. Here's the top of the review, by Neil Genzlinger:

You don’t have to go far into the press material for “The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie” before you hit the phrase “faith-and-values-based property.” It is used to describe this and earlier offerings from the VeggieTales franchise, but the “faith” component of this rather ordinary film for children doesn’t make itself readily apparent.

I suppose there is some value in offering a review for people who don't know about the previous work. But like the Simpsons, LOTR, Compass, Spider-Man etc etc films, VeggieTales comes with an automatic audience who understands the context and knows the characters. And for whom this review will seem curious at best.

Here's the link.

Update (17:32): By contrast, reviewer Kevin Crust with the L.A. Times had a very different take on the children's flick, finding it an entertaining spoof with a "worthwhile message."

—Ken Shepherd is Managing Editor of NewsBusters